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For the author of this elegantly written study of malady and the novel, decadence sums up the style of the 19th and 20th century writing that subverts ideologies of idealism and normality. In representing depraved states of mind and desire, the style shares much with Freud's studies of perversion and hysteria. Decadence, the author argues, fashions a rhetoric of sickness that develops from narratives of eviration, feminization, and “degenderation.” In Baudelaire, Constantin Guys, Hysmans, D'Annunzio, and Nietzsche, chronic illness informs a consciousness, growing in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, with which new subjects renew relations of body and mind. Male protagonists are feminized; they speak, as might a ventriloquist, through their constructions of the other.
In the first two chapters, Spackman shows that wherever the style appears to champion misogyny, a definite pattern emerges: a woman is expelled from the social order, but as a result, her pertinent traits are absorbed by an evirated convalescent. His sickness resembles a secular conversion, in whose process the martyred woman is virtually converted into a new body. The male who is feminized by his sickness bears signs of an androgynous sensibility that absorbs the features of the sacrificial victim. In Chapter 3, the author compares D'Annunzio's Le novelle delle Pescara and other works to Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria. In their clinical work the analysts arrogate the privilege of “translating” the “pictographic” symptoms of the female's hysterical body into medical language. Such, too, is the stance of D'Annunzio's narrators, for whom, too, a gradual conversion takes place. Their authority, as we also know from alert readings of Freud's early works, turns into an identification with the language of the hysteric.